And work we did. Breath. Stroke. Rotation. Kick. Head down. Butt up. On to the back. On to the belly. Kick board. No kick board. Flippers. No flippers. Swim swim swim. Move, move, move.

I’d always heard that swimming was the perfect exercise. Easy on the joints. Relaxing. Suitable for everyone from toddlers to fat old out-of-shape geezers. The perfect mellow for a fellow such as myself. That was obviously a lie. We’d only just begun and I was already looking at the clock. This wasn’t fun. This was torture. Sheesh. Give me a break. What in the world had I signed up for?

“Why do you want to take swimming lessons?” the nice woman at the rec center had asked me when I’d called a week earlier. “Are you thinking about doing a triathlon?”

Hmmmmm. I do run. I do bike. Sometimes I run and bike. Swimming seemed like the next logical step towards something else. At that point I hadn’t really thought about combining them and involving a stopwatch. But I did want this swim lesson thing to be taken seriously. I didn’t want to be humiliated by being thrown into a class of giggling youngsters learning to blow bubbles. I wanted to be humiliated in my own private grown-up bubble blowing class.

“Sure,” I mumbled, “idliketotryatri.”

“Can you swim?” The nice woman asked.

Well yeah. Of course I can swim. Everyone can swim. It’s just that I’ve spent most of my life avoiding it. When you’re a whitewater boater swimming is the last thing you want to do. Even so I’d managed to do plenty of swimming….a mildly horrifying but extensive collection of spectacular swim-for-your-life’s all the way from Ecuador to the Grand Canyon.

I’ve just never swum for fun.

“I’ll call some of our instructors,” the nice woman said.

Enter Ashley. Poor Ashley. Some day’s she must regret having ever picked up the phone. Ashley is 24 years old with a radiant smile, an easy laugh, long powerful swimmer’s arms and sun-bronzed skin from a lifetime spent outdoors. Ashley’s a teacher by profession, a passionate competitive open water swimmer –racing in the rough water, currents and swells of lakes and oceans—by vocation. In her spare time she gives swimming lessons.

Travel and OutWest editor Kyle Wagner grew up in Pittsburgh and lived in Lake County, Ill., and Naples, Fla., before moving to Denver in 1993, where she reviewed restaurants for Westword before moving to The Denver Post in 2002. She considers the best days to be those that involve her teenage daughters and doing something outside, preferably mountain biking or whitewater rafting.

Dean Krakel is a photo editor (primarily sports) at The Denver Post. A native of Wyoming, he has authored three books, "Season of the Elk," "Downriver" and "Krakel's West." An avid kayaker, rafter, mountain biker, trail runner, telemark skier and backpacker, Dean's outdoor adventures have taken him around the world.

Douglas Brown was raised about 30 miles west of Philadelphia in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where he spent a lot of time running around in the woods and fields (where he hunted and explored), and in the ocean (where he surfed and stared at the horizon). Now he lives in Boulder and spends as much time hiking, running, skiing and boarding the High Country (and the Boulder foothills) as possible.

Ricardo Baca is the entertainment editor and pop music critic at The Denver Post, as well as the founder and executive editor of Reverb and the co-founder of The UMS. Happy days often involve at least one of these: whitewater rafting, snowshoeing, vintage Vespas, writing, camping, live music, road trips, snowboarding or four-wheeling.